Re: XyWrite and C (in the 21st century)

[J R FOX jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

{Responding to various entries in this thread}:

The last known owner of the code was Ken Frank.

How many users are there still in the wild ? Who knows, but I'd venture it must be many times the
number of subscribers to this List.

A lot of this discussion re "What Ifs" of open source and Xy remind me of longstanding
similar discussions re open source and OS/2. Even if one were able to get past the non-starters,
such as IBM's repeated answer of 'NO !', the fact that MS owns at least some pieces of the code, and
the fact that there are by now some glaring holes in the viability of the OS -- such as multimedia
support, which impacts the handling of web content -- I have great doubts that there would be
anywhere to go with it. There was a time where it might possibly have worked (under ideal
circumstances), but I'm afraid that ship sailed quite some time ago.

There is some "market" in parts of the world where they don't want to pay for software or
don't have much interest in respecting intellectual property, where a fully capable OS that is not
from MS or Apple, and is noticeably more accessible than most Linux distros, might be able to gain
some traction. That *could have been* an updated OS/2. But even if you had it, I really doubt that
you could give it away to enough people to create the interest and snowball it into something. It's
probably too late for that now. And the same applies to Xy -- no matter how good it is, or how more
"up to date", and even for free.

--- On Wed, 9/3/08, Bill Troop  wrote:

> had XyWrite continued to be developed, it
> would have been recognized years ago that MSW was where the
> rest of the world was. So Xy would have tracked every new
> feature available in .rtf and be able to replicate Word docs
> virtually exactly. It would now be being used by hundreds of
> thousands as the smarter, faster alternative to MSW.

> The minute you're committed to absolute polarity with
> the latest rtf,
> you're taken seriously by a vastly greater number of
> potential
> private and corporate customers.

Well, it certainly wasn't Xy, and it did not try to duplicate the user interface of MSW, but didn't
this already happen -- substantially -- with Sun Office, which became Open Office ? If you can
open, work on, and save *their* documents, supporting a majority of the critical feature set, you're
there. That seems to be the case. They must have a user base in excess of 100,000 worldwide,
unless I'm greatly mistaken.


 Jordan